Personal blog where I share my thoughts/lessons/achievements

Using Failure for Growth

Failure is the most feared outcome of our actions and we try to avoid it at all cost, because the feeling it produce is not very pleasing for us – anxiety, stress and discomfort. We have been sold on the idea that playing it safe is less consuming of us. Well it’s true if you want to stay mediocrity. If you want to rise above your average, you must use failure as a growth tool.

Let us get it straight. Failure is far from being failure. Being failure means doing nothing and changing nothing. But how far would you go with that kind of mindset? Do you expect good things to happen from not doing anything?

For most of us, even though we understand that failure is not that bad thing, but the feeling of anxiety and stress it creates is not pleasing at all. But this is a very short-term thinking. We think about how would it make us feel now, but we fail to think how it would make us grow in the future.

It’s natural for humans to seek for instant gratifications and avoid unpleasantness. In short-term you will gain some pleasure, but in long-term you will be left unhappy. It’s like a hole in yourself that get bigger each time you go for instant gratifications and as it becomes bigger it requires more of pleasures and avoidance of unpleasant feelings.

The trade-off is obvious. For instant pleasures you trade your success of the future. This gratification can become a very hard to break habit. To break it you must first understand the idea and principles of growth.

To change the way we feel about failure we must change the way we understand it. Let’s take for example the bodybuilding or exercising. The only way we can grow the muscle is to break them. We must push them until muscles FAIL to lift the weight. And that’s when the growth occurs. Your body will repair the braked muscles tissues so that the next time you will be able to lift the same weight without failing. In order to grow you must fail.

Think of failure, pain, anxiety or stress as a positive sign of progress. Whenever it occurs it mean you are actually growing. Failure is like a resource that lets you to identify the edge of your capabilities.

If you don’t fail it means you aim way to low and below your fraction of potential. Don’t settle for less. Go where the stakes are high. Don’t fear the failure. It is said if you do the thing you fear, death of fear is certain.

Have courage to do what you can. Courage is not the absence of fear or and anxiety, it’s the proceeding in spite of those feelings.